With a mind
too inquisitive and excursive to be imprisoned within statutable
limits, he flew to subjects that interested his already manly tastes,
with a zest which it is in vain to expect that the mere pedantries of
school could inspire; and the irregular, but ardent, snatches of study
which he caught in this way, gave to a mind like his an impulse
forwards, which left more disciplined and plodding competitors far
behind. The list, indeed, which he has left on record of the works, in
all departments of literature, which he thus hastily and greedily
devoured before he was fifteen years of age, is such as almost to
startle belief,--comprising, as it does, a range and variety of
study, which might make much older "helluones librorum" hide their
heads.
Not to argue, however, from the powers and movements of a mind like
Byron's, which might well be allowed to take a privileged direction of
its own, there is little doubt, that to _any_ youth of talent and
ambition, the plan of instruction pursued in the great schools and
universities of England, wholly inadequate as it is to the
intellectual wants of the age,[43] presents an alternative of evils
not a little embarrassing. Difficult, nay, utterly impossible, as he
will find it, to combine a competent acquisition of useful knowledge
with that round of antiquated studies which a pursuit of scholastic
honours requires, he must either, by devoting the whole of his
attention and ambition to the latter object, remain ignorant on most
of those subjects upon which mind grapples with mind in life, or by
adopting, as Lord Byron and other distinguished persons have done, the
contrary system, consent to pass for a dunce or idler in the schools,
in order to afford himself even a chance of attaining eminence in the
world.
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